Cons:

I've always been a proponent of the idea that games teach things -- often without the player realizing it. It was, after all, games like Age of Empires II that first taught me what a trebuchet was, and I couldn't spend all those hours building pyramids in Pharaoh without learning a little bit about Egyptian history. The idea of an excellent game tied in with an excellent educational component, then, is something I've always believed should be possible. Clearly, the developer of Geniu$: The Tech Tycoon Game agree with me, because what they've put together is just such a game. Unfortunately, while Geniu$ does a lot of things right, neither the game portion nor the educational "puzzles" are good enough to be the breakthrough product they were obviously envisioning.

That's not to say that Geniu$ isn't any fun at all. In fact, Geniu$ is chock full of well genius ideas. The game's basic premise is that the player begins as new partner in a struggling bicycle shop in 1850. Chock full of new ideas for inventions and blessed with a rolodex filled with the leading scientific luminaries of the era, the player will have to guide his or her little bicycle shop through the next 100 years, gradually turning their little Mom-n-Pop shop into a multinational conglomerate just itching for an anti-trust lawsuit.

The majority of the game is played from a 3/4 perspective similar to any number of strategic city-building games. The player has to fund resource extractors like coal and iron mines, build refineries and a variety of factories, and finally find space for worker housing on one of six different maps, all the while keeping an eye on worker happiness, wages, supply levels, and, of course, the bottom line. It's all detailed by lovely graphics full of interesting little details such as walking citizens that reflect the current time period: as the eras pass, horse-drawn carriages eventually give way to autos, and so on.

What separates Geniu$ from similar games, though, is what might best be described as an "educational adventure game" buried within the strategy portion. As the player struggles to build his or her empire, six assistants will be diligently working in R&D on the great problems of the day in physics, optics, electronics, and other areas of scientific inquiry. Periodically, these assistants will break into the game and tell you about some sort of problem that only you can solve or a business opportunity only you can take advantage of. Inevitably, this means utilizing a recent scientific journal thoughtfully provided to solve a practical problem. These problems are the "educational" portion of the game. For example, you might need to figure out the correct height of a train boiler so that it holds a certain amount of water, or you might need to calculate the amount of weight a six-rope pulley will carry. Yes, there's math... and yes, some of it is really hard.